Sometimes, however, a native pile of manure can grow, if not asparagus, then unexpected blossoms. Nabokov’s Ania is a translation insofar as it was commissioned as such. At this stage, Nabokov’s ideas on translation are not theoretically articulated, though he partakes of the best of the nineteenth-century Romantic tradition. He shares with Zhukovskii an understanding of the translator as co-creator. Maurice Friedberg retells an anecdote about how Zhukovskii was asked by a German correspondent to send some of his own work for translation into German.
Zhukovskii sent him a list of the poems he had translated and appended a note: “While reading them, make believe that they are all translations from Zhukovskii’s Russian originals, or vice versa.”126 Nabokov feels the right to alter Carroll’s text neither out of desire to “smooth” the idiosyncrasies of the English text—a desire, after all, more neo-classical or sentimentalist than Romantic—nor because of a less than perfect command of the language—as in the two previous Russified versions—but because he wishes to replace Carroll’s idiosyncrasies with his own. His otsebiatina—the emendations of the original text—are not arbitrary, and are not dictated by propriety, good taste, or a laudable desire to instruct Russian children (as, for example, in Granstrem’s version of Alice). In other words, Nabokov’s version is anything but innocent and—here I would argue against Demurova’s conclusions—is not written for children.127 Zinaida Shakhovskaia, in In Search of Nabokov, rather observantly wrote about the young writer in his European years:
In those times it seemed that the entire world, all men, all streets, all buildings, and all clouds interested him to the extreme. He looked at everybody and everything he met with the gusto of a gourmét before a delicious dish; he fed not on himself but on his surroundings. Noticing everything and everybody, he was ready to pin them down like the butterflies of his collections: not only the clichéd, philistine [poshloe], and ugly, but also the beautiful;
though there was already the sense that the absurd gave him more pleasure.128
Like all translators of Alice before him, Nabokov faced multiple challenges that such a complex text entailed. While studying versions of Alice in numerous languages, Weaver classified some of the major problems of its translation: parodies whose sources were familiar to the contemporaries of Reverend Dodgson; puns;
nonsense play and the use of new words constructed according to the nonsense principle; jokes of logic; and, finally, specific shifts in meaning, usually quite original and unexpected.129 Demurova, elaborating on the specific difficulties that any translator of Carroll faces, and in an attempt to justify her own alterations to Carroll’s text, adds to the above the problems of authorial speech versus the speech of the characters; Carroll’s realization of metaphors understood literally; and the transposition of proper names.130
But for Nabokov, Carroll’s text is, in a sense, ideal: it presents structural and compositional difficulties akin to those of a complex puzzle, a crossword, or a chess problem—that is, the very problems of writing immanent in Nabokov’s fiction. Since Carroll’s humor is verbal and logical, not situational, any translator of Carroll is bound to choose between, as Demurova put it, “what is said and how it is said”131—in other words, between literalism and device.
The inherent link of Carroll’s work with Nabokov’s becomes apparent when one remembers Khodasevich’s perspicacious remark in 1937 about Nabokov as “for the most part an artist of form, of the writer’s device, and not only in that well-known and universally recognized sense in which the formal aspect of his writing is distinguished by exceptional diversity, complexity, brilliance, and novelty.”132 According to Khodasevich, Nabokov astonishes and catches everyone’s eye “because Sirin not only does not mask, does not hide his devices ... but, on the contrary, because Sirin himself places them in full view like a magician who, having amazed his audience, reveals on the very spot the laboratory of his miracles. This, it seems to me, is the key to all of Sirin. His works are populated not only with the characters, but with an infinite number of devices which, like elves or gnomes, scurry back and forth among the characters and perform an enormous amount of work.”133
Most of the technical problems are quite ingeniously solved by Nabokov. His transposition of proper names is very inventive:
the Rabbit becomes the “nobleman krolik Trusikov”134 (either from the Russian verb trusit with an accent on the second syllable,
“to trot along”; or from the verb trusit with an accent on the first syllable, “to be fearful,” “to have jitters”—a characteristic ascribed to hares in Russian folklore). The echo of this krolik can be heard in the name of Dr. Krolik from Nabokov’s Ada. The lizard Bill is
“Iashka-Iashcheritsa” (“Iashka-the-Lizard”), an added effect of sound repetition absent in Carroll, as was noted by both Karlinsky and Connolly;135 the Dormouse is called “Sonia” (both “sleepy head” and the generic name for a rodent); the Cheshire Cat becomes
“Maslenichnyi kot,”136 the Shrovetide Cat, the name derived from the Shrovetide week (maslenitsa), a festival parallel to Mardi Gras.
This association allows an interesting shift of logic to explain the cat’s perpetual grinning: a Russian proverb, “ne vse kotu maslenitsa”
(“it’s not always the Shrovetide season for the cat,” meaning roughly
“only so much for the indulgence”). The Duchess quotes the proverb and adds: “But it’s always Shrovetide for my cat: this is why he is grinning.”137 The least successful name transposition might be the Gryphon, who becomes simply “Grif,”138 a vulture, stripped of his heraldic and mythological connotations. Coincidently, he is “Grif”
in Allegro’s, Rozhdestvenskaia’s, and Granstrem’s versions, while in Sonia he remains the Gryphon.
For some shifts in meaning, Nabokov utilizes a device that he later so exuberantly put to use in his fiction: a misunderstanding based on a misheard word that may sound vaguely like a homophone.139 When the Mouse tells her tale, interpreted by Carroll’s Alice as a convoluted story in the shape of a “tail,” Nabokov makes his Mouse say that the tale is “prost” (“simple”), while Ania mistakes it for “khvost” (“a tail”).140 Similarly, when the Rabbit informs Alice that the Duchess has been sentenced to be executed, Carroll’s Alice asks “What for?,” which the Rabbit misinterprets as “What a pity!”
Nabokov’s Ania asks “Za kakuiu shalost?” (“For what kind of mischief?”), and the Rabbit thinks she said “Kakaia zhalost!” (“What a pity!”).141 These exchanges remind one of the famous dialogue in Lolita between Clare Quilty and Humbert Humbert that turns on
deliberate misinterpretation: “‘Where the devil did you get her?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘I said: the weather is getting better. . . .’”142 Nabokov’s congeniality with Carroll is especially apparent in their shared delight in etymology, the creation of portmanteau words, games, puzzles, and anagrams. Nabokov’s translation de-lights in invented etymology, as evidenced by the list of grotesque disciplines that the Mock-Turtle had to study: “Reeling and Writhing,” “Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision”143 (“chesat i pitat,” “sluzhenie, vymetanie, umorzhenie i pilenie”).144 Nabokov misses the opportunity to play on “French, music and washing—extra,”145 subjects derived from a conventional formula on boarding school bills. He replaces “French, music and washing—
extra” with “behavior,”146 which, as a separate subject that the Mock-Turtle could not afford, is of course funny; nevertheless, it was a habitual category in Russian school report cards, and was graded as all other subjects. The name of the Mock-Turtle (mock-turtle soup being an alien notion for Russia) presented enormous difficulty for all preceding translations: the Mock-Turtle, for example, is turned into a female in Sonia, and she is more a calf than a turtle, telling about the time she actually was a calf taught by a turtle at the bottom of the sea—a translator’s fancy run amok.147 In Allegro’s version, the Mock-Turtle’s gender is very confusing: called “cherepakha iz teliachei golovki” (“a turtle made of a calf’s head”) and referred to as female, she is nonetheless addressed by Alice as “sir.”148 Nabokov also makes the Mock-Turtle a female (which is inconsistent with her clear role as a male partner in the Lobster Quadrille), and invents for her a perfectly “Carrollian” portmanteau name, “Chepupakha”—
half “cherepakha” (turtle), half “chepukha” (nonsense).149
In addition to the impressive example it presents of the young translator’s verbal virtuosity, Ania previews the paths along which Nabokov would take his own fiction in just a few years. Those paths, the fault lines of the tradition delineated at the beginning of this chapter, feature a complex play on coded autobiographical/
pseudo-autobiographical information and on the fantastic element, which undermines the “objective” reality of the narrative; strategic games with the reader; and, finally, the centrality of language itself and its devices.
Nora Bukhs, in her insightful analysis of the structure of Nabokov’s early novels, points out the pseudo-autobiographical setup in Mary and Glory, noting that the image of the protagonist is created “as a projection not of Nabokov’s personality per se, but as a certain conventional, compound personage of an Author” that
“incorporates fragments of the biographies of Nabokov, Pushkin, a poet par excellence in Nabokov’s understanding, and those of literary characters from Pushkin and Shakespeare.”150 In the introduction to the English translation of Mashenka (Mary), Nabokov calls his first novel “a headier extract of personal reality ... than [that]
in the autobiographer’s scrupulously faithful account” of his Speak, Memory.151 Any attentive reader of Nabokov knows that dates and numbers in his texts are never accidental; they are a complex code, the deciphering of which lays bare a solution to a puzzle, sometimes revealing and sometimes intentionally misleading. Nabokov always tries to preserve this coded information in translation. For example, in the translation of Mary (done in collaboration with Michael Glenny), Nabokov introduces calendar changes, “the switch of seasonal dates in Ganin’s Julian Calendar to those of the Gregorian style in general use,” which he carefully orchestrates and points out in the preface to the English edition.152 The seven days during which the action of Mary develops, as Bukhs observes, refer the reader to a closed cycle of creation—in this case, the creation of the world of the past.153 According to her, the symbolism of the novel’s seventeen chapters is that of the Roman number XVII, which—
when transformed into letters and anagrammatically shifted—can form the word vixi in Latin, “I lived.”154 She reads the structure of the novel as an allusion to Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin: starting with an epigraph (omitted in the English edition) from stanza 47 of its first chapter and ending with an allusion to stanza 50 (on Pushkin’s imagined origin and the origin of his ancestor, Abram Gannibal—
Africa).155 This is the protagonist’s possible destination, his way out from “his dream-life in exile.”156 Similarly, the biography of another of Nabokov’s pseudo-biographical protagonists, Martin Edelweiss,
“a distant cousin of mine,” as Nabokov calls him in the preface to the English edition,157 is a reference to Pushkin’s biography and to Eugene Onegin’s chronology.158
It was in his translation of Carroll, however, that Nabokov first discovered delight in the seemingly innocent manipulation of numbers, whose synchronization provokes multiple echoes, allusions, and a structural order in the flux of complex narratives. In Carroll’s trial scene, the witnesses—the Hatter, the March Hare, and the Dormouse—give three different dates for the beginning of their endless tea-party: the fourteenth, the fifteenth, and the sixteenth of March.159 The jury then “wrote down all three dates on their slates, and then added them up, and reduced the answer to shillings and pence.”160 Nabokov’s Hatter gives a mad date of “chetyrnadtsatoe martobria” (the fourteenth of Martober—proof that Gogol was very much on Nabokov’s mind: the date refers to “Martober 86 between day and night” in Gogol’s “Diary of a Madman”).161 The Hare, rather than contradicting, confirms the date, and the Dormouse maintains it was the sixteenth.162 As a result, the jury comes up with the exact number of forty-four kopeks. The rationale for the change becomes clear in the subsequent quoting of the non-existent “Rule Forty-two” by the King in the next (and last) chapter of Carroll’s Alice, according to which “all persons more than a mile high [should]
leave the court.”163 In Nabokov’s Ania, the rule becomes “Law Forty-four.”164
The translation of Alice might have started and shaped Nabokov’s tendency to bestow “on the characters of my novels some treasured item of my past,” as he defined it in Speak, Memory.165 The nostalgic theme of reliving one’s childhood—fascination with their respective childhoods is a theme Nabokov shared with Carroll—accounts for the specific tangibility and concreteness of objects, transported from memory into Nabokov’s texts and generously distributed among his characters. In his Ania, as Demurova observed in “Alice on the Other Shores,”166 the treacle drawn by the three sisters in the Dormouse’s story is replaced by the syrup of Nabokov’s childhood—“patochnyi sirop” (treacle syrup) in the Russian version of Nabokov’s memoir Drugie berega, and “Golden Syrup imported from London [that]
would entwist with its glowing coils the revolving spoon” in Speak, Memory.167
In her essay “Lewis Carroll” (1939), Virginia Woolf wrote that childhood remained whole in Carroll, like a hard crystal in the jelly
of life: “For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it.”168 Nabokov’s Russian past, “severed” in its entirety, turned into “intangible property, unreal estate”;169 it inhabited his fiction and the Alice translation alike. Many years later, Nabokov described Alice in an interview as “a specific book by a definite author with its own quaintness, is own quirks, its own quiddity. If read carefully, it will be seen to imply, by humorous juxtaposition, the presence of a quite solid, and rather sentimental, world, behind the semi-detached dream.”170
Nabokov’s translation of Alice is essentially paraphrastic (the term that he himself later used as an insult), in the Romantic sense of this word. Romantic irony, which underscores text as an artifice and reflects on its conventional nature, accounts for its essential aspatiality. Russification notwithstanding, Ania’s wonderland is not Russian, not only because of its quaint and non-folkloric characters, nor because queens, duchesses, and judges in wigs are not typical Russian realia. Nor is this world English, for that matter. Its Gogolian mode combines the frivolous lucidity of “nonutilitarian and deceptive craftsmanship,”171—device for delight’s sake—with a structure that has, as it does later in Nabokov’s novels, ambiguous relations to what is “real.” Drawing on Nabokov’s metaphysics, Vladimir Alexandrov points out as a uniquely Nabokovian feature “the tantalizing possibility that there is only one correct way in which details can be connected, and one unique, global meaning that emerges from them. This follows from the fact that Nabokov elevates the creation of extraordinarily cunning puzzles to a fundamental esthetic principle, and draws explicit parallels between this literary tactic, the phenomenon of mimicry in nature, and the composition of chess problems.”172 Nabokov later defined Gogol’s style as “the sensation of something ludicrous and at the same time stellar, lurking constantly around the corner,” the difference between its comic and cosmic side depending “on one sibilant.”173 The non-space of Nabokov’s Russian Alice derives from its atemporality (ahistoricity might be a better term), as a synthesis in a Hegelian triad, still tracing the “initial arc” of a Russian childhood (to paraphrase Nabokov’s dialectical musings).
When as a young boy Nabokov discovered Hegel, he came to the very specific understanding of Hegel’s triads as an expression of the “spirality” of things in relation to time and, as a consequence, to the understanding of memory and imagination as a negation of time. Nabokov wrote in Speak, Memory:
The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.
I thought this up when I was a schoolboy, and I also discovered that Hegel’s triadic series (so popular in old Russia) expressed merely the essential spirality of all things in their relation to time.
Twirl follows twirl, and every synthesis is the thesis of the next series. If we consider the simplest spiral, three stages may be distinguished in it, corresponding to those of the triad: we can call “thetic” the small curve or arc that initiates the convolution centrally; “antithetic” the larger arc that faces the first in the process of continuing it; and “synthetic” the still ampler arc that continues the second while following the first along the outer side. And so on.174
Time, defined by Hegel in Philosophy of Nature as the self-negating of space itself,175 is not a form of intuition, as in Immanuel Kant, but an abstract, ideal being, “becoming directly intuited.”176 Place, however, is a spatial point enduring through time.177The Hegelian principle of sublation (negation of negation) underlies the dialectic found everywhere in Nabokov’s fiction. In Speak, Memory, he describes his own life in these terms: the thetic arc of his Russian childhood, the antithesis of his European exile, and—negating the negation—the stage of synthesis, his life in his “adopted country,”
and, consequently, a new thesis.178 This disbelief in time is more straightforwardly (but without references to Hegel) expressed in the Russian version of Nabokov’s memoir, Drugie berega (The Other Shores in English, 1954, the revised version of Conclusive Evidence, 1951):
I confess I don’t believe in the flying of Time—the light, liquid, Persian time! I learned to fold this magic carpet in such a fashion that one pattern would concur with the other. . . . And the utmost delectation for me—outside the diabolic time but very much inside the divine space—is a landscape selected at random, it
does not matter where, be it tundra or steppe, or even among the remains of some old pine grove by the railway between Albany and Schenectady, dead in this present context (where one of my favorite godchildren is flying, my blue samuelis)—in other words, any corner of this earth where I can be among butterflies and the plants they feed on. This is the ecstasy, and behind this ecstasy there is something that resists definition. It is something like an instantaneous void into which everything I love in this world is emptied out to fill it in. Something like an instantaneous flutter of tenderness and gratitude, addressed, as American letters of reference say, “to whom it may concern”—I don’t know to whom or to what, be it the human fate’s counterpoint of genius or benevolent spirits, spoiling their earthly pet.179
Extended from the realm of fate to that of art, the sublation principle defines Nabokov’s antipathy to a thetic solution. A passage in Speak, Memory, absent in the Russian memoir, describes Nabokov’s completion of a chess problem that formally concluded the antithesis of his European exile: an elegant problem designed for the delectation of a sophisticated connoisseur. The unsophisticated
Extended from the realm of fate to that of art, the sublation principle defines Nabokov’s antipathy to a thetic solution. A passage in Speak, Memory, absent in the Russian memoir, describes Nabokov’s completion of a chess problem that formally concluded the antithesis of his European exile: an elegant problem designed for the delectation of a sophisticated connoisseur. The unsophisticated